How I Overcame Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Or Lev is a 30 year old woman who deals with OCD since she was 8 years old, before the internet and before therapy was a common and acceptable thing. In the last 10+ years she documented her struggle with the OCD and how it affected her life at school, with her classmates, puberty, depression, sexuality, collage, love life and more. Read her diary and follow her story as she grows up and finds the way to overcome OCD and win at the day to day wars with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. "One day I went to the bathroom, I had done all the actions that I was supposed to do, but I could not stop. I found myself washing my hands again and again simply because I didn't feel good. I hadn't felt like it was done properly and that I had covered every single spot on each hand. I continued to wash my hands again and again until the soap was soaked into my skin. When it happened, I didn't feel like my hands were clean because the soap disappeared. As if maybe I didn't wash my hands and they're not really clean. And so I would add more and more soap. Washing and adding soap, washing and adding, I would finish more than half a bottle of liquid soap. I couldn't stop. I stood like this for half an hour while washing my hands, getting annoyed with myself, stomping my feet, feeling an urge to move, crying nonstop and going nuts. My father approached me, told me enough. He grabbed my hands and moved them from the sink. I cried and brought them back and kept washing. I told him to leave me alone. After 10 minutes he came back and I was still there. Washing my hands. He told me enough, finished. I did not manage to. As he walked down the hall again, I closed the door with my leg. After 10 minutes of terrible and ongoing suffering, I stopped. My hands were red, dry, bleeding and sore. With a lot of foam still left in the sink, so much so that it was completely flooded. And even then I did not feel well. So I opened the door carefully, with my elbow of course, went through the hallway to my room and got under the blanket. I fell asleep. In total it took me more than 45 minutes to wash my hands. It's my memory, it's what I remember, the lack of control, that stage when I realized more and more how bad my situation was and continued to do it all anyway with one thought in mind - there is something wrong with me."